Dell ups ante in ARMs race with 64-bit Iron server

ARM and Intel can live together in an Open Compute Summit management spec demo.

Enlarge/ Dell's Chief Architect and Technologist Jimmy Pike shows an Iron board with six individual 64-bit ARM servers at the Open Compute Summit.

At today's Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, California, Dell showed off a new generation of X-Gene 64-bit ARM-based servers that the company is developing for data center customers. It also demonstrated new management software based on Open Compute Project standards allowing remote control of both Intel and ARM-based servers. The software and server designs Dell demonstrated would allow Intel and ARM-based systems to run in the same chassis.

The latest development server, called Dell Iron, was shown by Dell Chief Architect and Technologist Jimmy Pike. It was built using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) from Applied Micro. Last June, Dell started shipping a 32-bit ARM-based server (called Copper), which was based on a similar architecture, as "microserver" boards plugged into Dell's PowerEdge C5000 chassis. Copper had 4 system-on-a-chip nodes per board; Iron is designed to support six physical ARM servers per board for potentially up to 72 ARM servers in a single 3-unit chassis. And the ARM sleds, which support the Open Compute Project's remote machine management specification, could be installed side-by-side with servers based on Intel and AMD x86-based processors in the same physical chassis.

The problem with massive numbers of ARM-based servers, however, is that they all have to be managed. "We're going to see volumes (of servers) we've never imagined," Pike said in his presentation at the Open Compute Summit.

That's the problem that the OCP strives to address with the Open Hardware Management draft remote control specification. Based on the Data Center Manageability Interface (itself a subset of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface), the spec is intended to ensure a common level of functionality for OCP-based servers in "hyperscale" environments—massive data centers like those of Facebook, Amazon, and Google. It allows for rapid provisioning, reporting of data from onboard sensors, and remote control of power and networking configurations. Pike and Dell demonstrated the Dell Iron board's compatibility with DCMI and the OCP standard, running the ARM development system alongside a set of Intel servers and controlling them with a Project Sputnik laptop running Ubuntu and Ipmitool 1.8.12, an open-source management tool.

Hewlett-Packard has also been looking at ARM processors for its own high-density server program, Project Moonshot, using Calxeda's 32-bit EnergyCore ARM processors in its Redstone demonstration servers—boasting 288 server nodes in a 4U chassis. HP hasn't shipped Redstone to customers yet and in its most recent Moonshot effort, called "Gemini," HP used Intel Atom processors instead of ARM. But HP still says it is committed to ARM servers; in October, the company announced it expected ARM to account for 15 percent of the server market by the end of 2014.

32 Reader Comments

Less than 100 weak arm cores per U, color me unimpressed, standard blades can do 72 SB cores per U, even more if you can put up with the weaker cores of Piledriver (still way more capable than any ARM core). The SB cores can be oversubscribed between 5:1 and 10:1 depending on your workload so they're at 350-700 effective cores per U. Unless these blades with memory and other necessary I/O modules are a fraction of the cost of normal blades I'm not sure where they fit in.

Less than 100 weak arm cores per U, color me unimpressed, standard blades can do 72 SB cores per U, even more if you can put up with the weaker cores of Piledriver (still way more capable than any ARM core). The SB cores can be oversubscribed between 5:1 and 10:1 depending on your workload so they're at 350-700 effective cores per U. Unless these blades with memory and other necessary I/O modules are a fraction of the cost of normal blades I'm not sure where they fit in.

Add to that, Intel is already shipping 64-bit Atom server chips which look to be power and cost competitive with ARM chips. Plus, they can eat the same code you're already running on your Xeons or Opterons.

I am sure they will be a fraction of the price but to power a 10u Chassis of highend SB cores I need 2.5KVA of power or more... This stuff is significantly better....

It's not for all workloads... only some make sense...

afidel wrote:

Less than 100 weak arm cores per U, color me unimpressed, standard blades can do 72 SB cores per U, even more if you can put up with the weaker cores of Piledriver (still way more capable than any ARM core). The SB cores can be oversubscribed between 5:1 and 10:1 depending on your workload so they're at 350-700 effective cores per U. Unless these blades with memory and other necessary I/O modules are a fraction of the cost of normal blades I'm not sure where they fit in.

Less than 100 weak arm cores per U, color me unimpressed, standard blades can do 72 SB cores per U, even more if you can put up with the weaker cores of Piledriver (still way more capable than any ARM core). The SB cores can be oversubscribed between 5:1 and 10:1 depending on your workload so they're at 350-700 effective cores per U. Unless these blades with memory and other necessary I/O modules are a fraction of the cost of normal blades I'm not sure where they fit in.

Add to that, Intel is already shipping 64-bit Atom server chips which look to be power and cost competitive with ARM chips. Plus, they can eat the same code you're already running on your Xeons or Opterons.

Recent benchmarks have shown that modern ARM cores can outperform Atom at the same clock, so I'm not sure that's much of an advantage. ARM chips are still more power efficient than Atom, and lower cost. For the right workloads, this is a much better deal than an x86 based system. There is no end all, be all solution in computing, and this type of system fits into a nice segment that x86 doesn't fit as well.

Until recently I worked on Moonshot (hired by another company). HP is not committing to ANY chip, they're making it a flexible platform you can plug Atoms or arms into. It will be up to the customer to decide what is right for their application stack.

Recent benchmarks have shown that modern ARM cores can outperform Atom at the same clock, so I'm not sure that's much of an advantage. ARM chips are still more power efficient than Atom, and lower cost. For the right workloads, this is a much better deal than an x86 based system. There is no end all, be all solution in computing, and this type of system fits into a nice segment that x86 doesn't fit as well.

Every time I read someone talking about how much more power efficient ARM is than x86, I half expect them to finish with "It is known."

A15 cores outperform Saltwell cores by using significantly more power. Guess what? So do IVB and Piledriver.

Krait Cores use less power than Saltwell cores; if they have a half node process advantage, and if you don't count their L2 cache, and Atom still outperforms them.

We have no idea what 64-bit ARM server chips will cost, as there won't be any available for at least 9-12 months.

There's plenty of uses for ARM chips, but repeating the same demonstrably false claims doesn't make them true.

A heck of a lot of people appear to be Intel Fans or x86 fans. In my opinion Intel has been having to contend with next to no competition since 2006 (when the Core 2 Duo chips first surfaced). It is nice to see them squirm and innovate with their new ATOM processors. We can thank ARM for that.

That being said I rather like my Tegra 3 Tablet and am looking forward to Tegra 4. I'm not as fond of ATOM in the handheld space as I am ARM thus far. Mostly because I enjoy the Tegra 3s 4+1 design... in practice is really does allow my Tablet (Asus TF300T) to last over 8hrs with the Docking keyboard.

Until we have these units in hand and can, hopefully, conduct real-world tests, it's all marketing-speak. Even then we will be bound by the tool-chains used as well as any conceptual limitations of the engineers creating the software. Looking at the tools at hand, Intel probably has an edge in parallel-programming. Perhaps.

Recent benchmarks have shown that modern ARM cores can outperform Atom at the same clock, so I'm not sure that's much of an advantage. ARM chips are still more power efficient than Atom, and lower cost. For the right workloads, this is a much better deal than an x86 based system. There is no end all, be all solution in computing, and this type of system fits into a nice segment that x86 doesn't fit as well.

Every time I read someone talking about how much more power efficient ARM is than x86, I half expect them to finish with "It is known."

Haha. Nothing technical to add, just enjoyed the "it is known" as Game of Thrones images pop into my head.

Beside linux and the rest of the open source stack that has been compiled for the ARM processors, what would I run on this? Companies that need large, horizontally scaled web farms might go for this, but I don't see where this would play in an average corporation that buys 99% of their software from ISVs.

Beside linux and the rest of the open source stack that has been compiled for the ARM processors, what would I run on this? Companies that need large, horizontally scaled web farms might go for this, but I don't see where this would play in an average corporation that buys 99% of their software from ISVs.

You're looking at this from a "blueshifted" perspective, I think. Here:

-- edit ars comments cuts of the ), so click on the first link on the wikipedia page

No, it's not going to be much use for running exchange, but the big tech companies are buying servers by the millions and they're not paying per-cpu license fees to anyone. They start with linux, and then add their own software.

What i see is that there is a move away from general purpose cpu towards a custom configured ARM chip for a specific set of tasks.E.G. Virtual Desktop Server has a very different requirement from a number crunching low power super computer.

I see the FPGA system in the article very useful for people like Amazon which don't know when they commission a server if its going to be a Windows File Server, A Linux Bitcoin farmer, a Node for a on-demand and temporary Super computer. They can firmware update the unit on the fly to be what ever the customer needs.

The high core count, low power usage stuff like this belongs to the cloud-specific subgroup of servers. The idea is NOT to host a site on them as you would a traditional dedicated server, but to have several bays of these things that allow for large scale virtualization. A few threads running here, a few threads there.

I look forward to the day when traditional dedicated servers are in the form of something like an Xbox that just plugs into an empty bay for it's redundant power feed but is otherwise connected up front. MANY people don't like vendor specific management tied to vendor specific hardware, but open compute seems to be creating a general, and perhaps even more eye-role worthy layer.

One benefit of ARM micro-blades is that I can buy my own personal blade, configure it however I want, and send it off to a hosting company for colocation. And even then, it's mine mine and ONLY mine.I'm not running a virtual server, I don't have to think about sharing, this is more like renting micro-U slots in a colocation rack.

It's hard to imagine this being more than a "hobby" project for Dell. Something not intended to take the market by storm, but rather to gain experience with the technology, especially the software and management tech. While I think the jury's still out on whether ARM will end up having significant price/performance or performance/watt advantages over Atom, anything based on an FPGA soft core almost certainly isn't going to deliver any of those advantages. I don't know whose FPGA they are using, but if it's a typical Xilinx or Altera, even a high-end one, I'd be amazed if those cores were running at more than a few hundred MHz. Putting a soft core on an FPGA is purely a time-to-market play, IMHO, to try to get a foot in before Intel's 64-bit Atom solution ships in quantity.

I don't really understand why people are excited about 64bit-arm. I mean, I thought the whole idea was to have a massive amount of low-power servers, so who cares about the limited address space? And it looks like there's even a LPAE for cortex-A15 processors, so really it seems like your specializing further to single threads that require more than 4gb of memory.

I don't really understand why people are excited about 64bit-arm. I mean, I thought the whole idea was to have a massive amount of low-power servers, so who cares about the limited address space? And it looks like there's even a LPAE for cortex-A15 processors, so really it seems like your specializing further to single threads that require more than 4gb of memory.

So why does it matter?

From what I've read, there are software techniques that benefit from the huge 64-bit address space, even if it's only backed by < 4GB of physical memory. Things like address space randomization come to mind. Plus, IIRC, certain types of hashing and other database-related algorithms are supposed to work better with large memory pointers.

On the x86 side, it's more of a no-brainer. With all your hardware using the same 64-bit architecture, jobs can be seamlessly migrated between lightweight Atom hosts and big Xeons without needing recompile.

Less than 100 weak arm cores per U, color me unimpressed, standard blades can do 72 SB cores per U, even more if you can put up with the weaker cores of Piledriver (still way more capable than any ARM core). The SB cores can be oversubscribed between 5:1 and 10:1 depending on your workload so they're at 350-700 effective cores per U. Unless these blades with memory and other necessary I/O modules are a fraction of the cost of normal blades I'm not sure where they fit in.

ARM processors are far better the company has spent years working on low wattage processors.

1.2Ghz risc is not the same as 1.2ghz cisc

Most people think risc and cisc perform the same way depending on clock speed thats not the case.

This option is really based on understanding on how processors work.ARMH will will win this one hands down.

If you think there's a meaningful distinction between a modern RISC and CISC processor it's you who doesn't understand how they work. RISC processors have been adding more specialized instructions and are now pipelined, and CISC (specifically x86) processors decode those large frontend instructions into RISC like microops. The CISC->RISC decoders are less than 5% of the compute portion of the die and less than 1% of the overall transistor count and the more rich commands means you get a higher cache hit percentage on average.

ARM processors are far better the company has spent years working on low wattage processors.

1.2Ghz risc is not the same as 1.2ghz cisc

Most people think risc and cisc perform the same way depending on clock speed thats not the case.

This option is really based on understanding on how processors work.ARMH will will win this one hands down.

Reading that was like having rusty nails driven into my eyes. I hope, for the sake of everyone you know, that you posted that in a rush. From a phone. With a very small screen.

The more comments I read, the more I suspect that the most vocal ARM fans are former AMD fans who finally gave up, and moved on to the next great hope to beat Intel.

Well I don't know about "fans" but from my readings the ARM ecosystem seems to have lower barriers to entry. There's a Chinese company cranking them out with improvements. With x86 the ecosystem is big because of first mover advantages but harder in some ways to get into and driven by one source, Intel.

ARM processors are far better the company has spent years working on low wattage processors.

1.2Ghz risc is not the same as 1.2ghz cisc

Most people think risc and cisc perform the same way depending on clock speed thats not the case.

This option is really based on understanding on how processors work.ARMH will will win this one hands down.

Reading that was like having rusty nails driven into my eyes. I hope, for the sake of everyone you know, that you posted that in a rush. From a phone. With a very small screen.

The more comments I read, the more I suspect that the most vocal ARM fans are former AMD fans who finally gave up, and moved on to the next great hope to beat Intel.

Well I don't know about "fans" but from my readings the ARM ecosystem seems to have lower barriers to entry. There's a Chinese company cranking them out with improvements. With x86 the ecosystem is big because of first mover advantages but harder in some ways to get into and driven by one source, Intel.

Considering AMD wrote the x86-64 instruction set and Intel was forced to adopt it by the market I wouldn't say Intel is the only driver in the market.

Lots of comments here about "currently" Intel v. ARM, like "currently, Intel chips are much more powerful" and "currently, ARM chips are more power-efficient"....all that will change in the next few years. Didn't read any posts about Microsoft's project "Blue" server....but I think they're working on a server OS which will run on ARM....after all, they already invested in making an ARM version of Windows, and they alway had the same code base for client and server.....

Good to see some competition with the Wintel monopoly.....which was never attacked by the FTC or world governments, since I suppose, "you can't have a two company monopoly, right?"....like, the merger of T-mobile and AT&T Wireless (#2 and #3) wouldn't have been a monopoly? But they're in the same business, and Microsoft and Intel are not, right??? Uhhhh, reconsider that.........